Ruthless Cosmopolitan -- In Summer, Jewish studies programs flourish

My Ruthless Cosmopolitan column, originally published in JTA on August 1, 2011

Visitors to the Auschwitz Museum Memorial in Oswiecim, Poland, enter the Arbeit Macht Frei gate on a rainy day. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

KRAKOW, Poland (JTA) -- In Austria and Poland recently, I couldn't seem to get away from students, scholars and just plain interested folks who were taking or teaching summer programs in Jewish studies.

I myself spoke at a three-day "summer academy" in Vienna where more than 100 members of the general public turned up for lectures by international experts on Eastern European Jewish history.

In both Vienna and Krakow, I met informally with some of the 71 teachers from Jewish and public schools in North America and Israel attending a nine-day summer academy of lectures, travel and workshops organized by the Vienna-based Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation.

The programs reflected the remarkable resurgence of both Jewish informal learning and academic studies that has taken place in Europe since the fall of communism. This process has opened up opportunities and fields of scholarship to new generations of students and researchers. It also has gone some way toward repairing the damage wrought by the Holocaust.

About 750 institutions of European Jewish learning were "lost forever" in the war, according to the European Association of Jewish Studies, with many cities experiencing a "near total devastation of their Jewish studies resources." In postwar communist Europe, teaching and research in Jewish and Holocaust studies was virtually taboo.

The pace of reconstruction has varied from country to country. But today the European Association of Jewish Studies lists nearly 450 academic institutions and universities in two dozen European countries where Jewish studies courses or classes are taught. Many other programs are associated with non-academic bodies.

Summer programs have a special place in this scheme, as they often are geared specifically to visiting foreign participants. Some of them, such as the 5-year-old Leo Baeck Summer University at Humboldt Unviersity in Berlin, are organized in partnership with North American or Israeli institutions.

The benefits of study abroad programs are well known: exposure to other cultures and languages, contact with new ideas, the opportunity to forge international connections.

Looking back, my own days on a university study abroad program in Europe set the course of my life. I spent the first semester of my senior year studying art and art history on an American university program in Rome. I returned to the States to complete my degree and graduate, but within a few months I had moved back to Europe. I have lived here ever since.

So it was revealing to meet people who had chosen to spend part of their vacations this summer delving into Jewish history or Holocaust studies -- and to hear about the often-unexpected impact of such on-site experience. That was the case especially in Poland, the prewar Jewish heartland that turned into the main Nazi killing ground.

"These are seriously motivated people," Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, a professor at Krakow's Jagiellonian University, told me about the more than 20 students from the United States, Latin America, Israel and elsewhere who had enrolled in the first international Summer Academy organized by the memorial museum at the former Auschwitz death camp.

Held in July, it focused on Auschwitz and the Holocaust as well as on postwar history, Polish-German relations during the war and the educational challenges facing the Auschwitz Museum.

"You can imagine that it is physically and geographically and psychologically not easy to decide to take courses that will not only take up weekends and holiday time, but will actually be held at Auschwitz," said Orla-Bukowska, who has taught Jewish and Holocaust courses in several summer programs in Poland.

Hailey Dilman, a Jewish studies graduate student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was one of 10 U.S. and Canadian students who took part in the annual fellows program for graduate students offered by the Auschwitz Jewish Center. The center is an independent institution affiliated with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and is located in Oswiecim, the town where the Auschwitz camp is sited.

The three-week fellowship combined travel to Holocaust and Jewish heritage sites with courses and archival work on Polish Jewish history and contemporary Jewish life.

Though much of the focus of her graduate and undergraduate work had been on the Holocaust, Dilman had never visited Poland or the Nazi death camps. She said that studying the impact of the Holocaust where it actually took place had been a revelation.

"It was amazing for me to learn that even though the Jews basically disappeared from Poland, they left such a strong imprint on Polish society that is still felt today," said Dilman, who is from Toronto. "Before the trip, I theoretically knew this was so, but I had to experience it to actually learn of it."

Elizabeth Bryant, a doctoral candidate at Florida State University, also was an Auschwitz Jewish Center fellow. Her master's degree had focused on Auschwitz -- but like Dilman, she had never visited the camp.

"Trips like this serve as a reminder that life is not always in black and white -- something that is sometimes difficult to remember when studying the Holocaust," she said. "The complexities of Polish culture serve to eradicate the notion that Poland can only be defined by its past, whether through communism or World War II."

Bryant called her fellowship experience "life changing."

"I do not say this lightly," she told me. "This program impacted me more deeply than I ever could have imagined."

And that, indeed, may have been the point.

My new column -- in Italian

Monument to the Holocaust, Buehl. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

I've started writing a brief commentary/column for the web site of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities -- moked.it.

The editor asked me to "read" or "read into" one of my photographs -- or another image -- each week.

I started with a picture I took last month in Buehl, Germany (when I was there for a conference on Bluegrass Music) of the monument marking the spot where the synagogue stood before it was destroyed on Kristallnacht. Today, an Italian ice cream parlor stands there. I used the picture as a peg to discuss (very briefly) German commemoration of the Shoah.

Nel cuore di Buehl, una piccola città tedesca non lontano da Baden-Baden, si gusta gelato italiano sul posto dove per più di 110 anni sorgeva la sinagoga. Fra i tavolini davanti al "Eis-cafe Italia", così come in tante altre città e cittadine tedesche, un monumento molto semplice fa parte ormai dell'arredo urbano, che segna e forma il tessuto vivente del luogo. Memoria quotidiana, dunque. Memoria di oggigiorno (come i monumenti ai caduti di guerra che sono disseminati in ogni cittadina italiana). Per i curiosi, per chi si ferma a leggere, il monumento informa che fino al 10 novembre 1938, la famigerata Notte dei Cristalli, si trovava lì una sinagoga costruita in 1823. Sul suo sito web, lo Yad Vashem ha un filmato che mostra la sua distruzione. Il filmato fu girato da un pompiere, un vigile del fuoco, un amatore che girava i film per hobby. Secondo lo Yad Vashem, voleva "catturare il lavoro dei suoi collegi", mostrali mentre controllavano il fuoco in modo che distruggesse soltanto la sinagoga e non gli altri palazzi intorno. Un anno fa, parlando i occasione del Giorno della Memoria in Germania, l'ex ambasciatore di Israele Avi Primor si è posto una domanda: "Dove nel mondo si è mai vista una nazione che costruisce monumenti alla sua propria vergogna?".

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Klezmer Music and the Ghost of Germany's past

Here's my latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column on JTA -- about Punk Cabaret klezmer danse macabre in Germany... namely, a concert by Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird, which I heard in Freiburg at the height of the controversy over the pope's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop....It was a terrific concert, and the band's latest CD -- just released -- is also great. Partisans and Parasites.

Me and The Painted Bird in Freiburg.

Feb. 25, 2009

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

FREIBURG, Germany (JTA) -- At the height of the recent uproar over Pope Benedict XVI's rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop, I attended a klezmer concert in the pontiff's native Germany.

The timing was coincidental. I didn't deliberately set out to counter the pernicious folly of denying history by listening to music rooted in the culture the Nazis sought to destroy.

Still, the concert started me to thinking -- about what and how we remember; about what and how we forget; and about the role contemporary cultural expressions play in determining how we think about things.

I had been to many klezmer concerts in Germany in the past. The traditional music of East European Jews has had a wide following here since the 1980s, when American and other artists began to tour. Scores of homegrown klezmer bands have been formed, and several leading American Jewish music performers settled in Berlin or elsewhere in the country.

Germany's particular history, of course, played a role in the music's popularity.

Some Germans, especially those from older generations, became attracted as part of the manifold process of dealing with the Nazi legacy that is commonly known here as "working through the past."

For more youthful musicians and fans, however, the baggage of guilt is mostly absent. For some, the klezmer sound simply forms part of the eclectic exoticism of world music. For others, its rich cultural contexts provide stimulus for their own creative interpretation.

The group I saw this time was The Painted Bird, a Berlin-based band pointedly named for the Holocaust novel by Jerzy Kosinski. Known for making music with a sharp political edge, the band describes itself on its MySpace page as "Punk Cabaret + Radical Yiddish Song + Gothic American Folk + Klezmer Danse Macabre."

Its leader is Daniel Kahn, a 30-year-old Detroit native who forms part of the current wave of American Jewish musical transplants to the German capital.

The concert I attended was performed before a standing-room-only crowd in Freiburg, a university town in the southern part of the country.

Spotlighted on the stage and dressed in black, Kahn sang through a megaphone and switched between accordion, piano and ukelele as he chewed up stereotypes and spit them out in an almost in-your-face challenge to the audience.

Most of the songs were from the band's new CD, "Partisans and Parasites," a collection of original pieces and reworked Yiddish songs that deftly juggles genres, styles, epochs and languages.

Kahn's song "Parasites" tells of species that live on others who then sometimes kill them. His "Khurbn Katrina" mourns the destruction of New Orleans with a soulful mix of Yiddish and Bourbon Street. A beautifully reworked version of the Yiddish classic "Borscht" employs English translation to reveal a rollicking love song.

About halfway through the show, the band launched into its most notorious number, a deliberately provocative tune about the power and folly of revenge.

Called "Six Million Germans/Nakam," it recounts how East European Jewish partisans formed a group called Nakam -- Revenge -- that sought to avenge the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust by poisoning Germans’ bread and water.

The plot was foiled, and Nakam disbanded. Its leader, Abba Kovner, went on to become one of Israel's most noted poets.

"Six Million Germans! 6 Million Germans!" goes the chorus, chanted against the background of bouncy klezmer riffs combined with a spirited oompah march.

The audience seemed to love it.

"Ultimately, it's not about the absence of justice or victims," Kahn told me when we sat and talked after the show. "It's not about Jews and Germans; it's about revenge. It's about the sense of vengeance and whether or not that really has sense."

Kahn told me how history provided an inescapable background for his work.

"I think we're all doomed to repeat history whether we want to or not," Kahn said. "The question is, what part of history are we going to repeat? Even if you don't actively remember the past, the past is going to come and remind you of itself."

There was something "naively sort of quaint" about Holocaust denial, he added. But other forms of deliberate amnesia can also be destructive, Kahn said.

"It would be nice if we were the kind of animal that can't do these things to each other," he said. "But to deny that we did it then is to deny that we're doing it now. It's to deny a very real problem that humanity has to deal with, which is the problem of racism, fascism, dehumanization, collective punishment.

"We sing songs about this, about memory, about memory politics. But ultimately it's not only about do we remember or are we remembering or is there something to remember. It's what exactly are we supposed to not forget, what does 'never again' really mean.

"Is it 'never again' to us?" he asked. "Is it never forget this? We need to look again at what it is we're supposed to remember."

A few days before I saw The Painted Bird, the music critic of The Jewish Chronicle of London, Paul Lester, raised hackles in the Jewish music world by slamming what he called "the fake roots music of the klezmer brigade."

"The best Jewish music -- or rather, the best music by Jews -- reflects the moment and is somehow a response to the times in which it was made," Lester wrote. "And if there is a 'Jewish voice,' it is not to be heard in klezmer, maybe because it is being drowned out by all those clarinets, violins and accordions."

The "Jewish voice" he was seeking, Lester wrote, was "urbane, witty, sharp, smart, savvy, often satirical and thoroughly contemporary. It also has an American accent."

To my ears, that's a pretty good description of The Painted Bird.